Sino-Japanese vocabulary, also known as , is a subset of Japanese vocabulary that originated in Chinese or was created from elements borrowed from Chinese. Most Sino-Japanese words were borrowed in the 5th–9th centuries AD, from Early Middle Chinese into Old Japanese. Some grammatical structures and sentence patterns can also be identified as Sino-Japanese.
is one of three broad categories into which the Japanese vocabulary is divided. The others are native Japanese vocabulary (yamato kotoba) and borrowings from other, mainly Western languages (gairaigo). It has been estimated that about 60% of the words contained in modern Japanese dictionaries are , and that about 18–20% of words used in common speech are . The usage of such words increases in formal or literary contexts, and in expressions of abstract or complex ideas.
, the use of Chinese-derived words in Japanese, is to be distinguished from kanbun, which is historical Literary Chinese written by Japanese in Japan. Both in modern Japanese and classical kanbun have Sino-xenic linguistic and phonetic elements also found in Korean and Vietnamese: that is, they are "Sino-foreign", meaning that they are not pure Chinese but have been mixed with the native languages of their respective nations. Such words invented in Japanese, often with novel meanings, are called wasei-kango. Many of them were created during the Meiji Restoration to translate non-Asian concepts and have been reborrowed into Chinese.
is also to be distinguished from gairaigo of Chinese origin, namely words borrowed from modern Chinese dialects, some of which may be occasionally spelled with Chinese characters or kanji just like . For example, (Pekin, "Beijing") which was borrowed from a modern Chinese dialect, is not , whereas (Hokkyō, "Northern Capital", a name for Kyoto), which was created with Chinese elements, is .
Background
Ancient China's political and economic influence in the region shaped the languages of Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and other languages in East and Southeast Asia throughout history in a manner comparable to Koine Greek and Latin in the West. The Middle Chinese word for gunpowder, (),Baxter-Sagart Old Chinese reconstruction, version 1.0 , also available at Wiktionary; see also Baxter's transcription for Middle Chinese is rendered as hwayak in Korean, and as kayaku in Japanese.
At the time of initial contact, Old Japanese lacked a writing system, whereas Chinese had a long-established script and a substantial body of academic and scientific information. Classical Chinese, known as Kanbun in Japanese, became the earliest written language in Japan, serving as the medium for science, scholarship, religion, and government. The Kanbun writing system essentially required every literate Japanese to be competent in written Chinese, although it is unlikely that many Japanese people were then fluent in spoken Chinese. Chinese pronunciation was approximated in words borrowed from Chinese into Japanese.
Chinese loanwords also reshaped Japanese phonology, introducing closed syllables (CV(N), alongside CV) and length becoming a phonetic feature with the development of both long vowels and long consonants. (See Early Middle Japanese: Phonological developments for details.)
Grammar
Sino-Japanese words are almost exclusively nouns, of which many are verbal nouns or adjectival nouns, meaning that they can act as verbs or adjectives. Verbal nouns can be used as verbs by appending (e.g. ), while an adjectival noun uses instead of (usual for nouns) when acting attributively.
In Japanese, verbs and adjectives (that is, inflecting adjectives) are closed classes, and despite the large number of borrowings from Chinese, virtually none of these became inflecting verbs or adjectives, instead being conjugated periphrastically as above.
In addition to the basic verbal noun + suru form, verbal nouns with a single-character root often experienced sound changes, such as → → , as in , and some cases where the stem underwent a sound change, as in , from .
Sino-Japanese and on'yomi The term is usually identified with , a system of pronouncing Chinese characters in a way that at one point approximated the original Chinese. On'yomi is also known as the 'Sino-Japanese reading', and is opposed to under which Chinese characters are assigned to, and read as, native Japanese vocabulary.
There are cases where the distinction between on'yomi and kun'yomi does not correspond to etymological origin. Chinese characters created in Japan, called , normally only have kun'yomi, but some kokuji do have on'yomi. One such character is (as in hataraku, "to work"), which was given the on'yomi dō (from the on'yomi of its phonetic component, ) when used in compounds with other characters, e.g. in rōdō ("labor"). Similarly, the character ("gland") has the on'yomi sen (from the on'yomi of its phonetic component, sen "spring, fountain"), e.g. in hentōsen "tonsils"; it was intentionally created as a and does not have a kun'yomi at all. Although not originating in Chinese, both of these are regarded as 'Sino-Japanese'.
That a word is the kun'yomi of a kanji is not a guarantee that the word is native to Japanese. There are a few Japanese words that, although they appear to have originated in borrowings from Chinese, have such a long history in the Japanese language that they are regarded as native and are thus treated as kun'yomi, e.g., uma "horse" and ume. These words are not regarded as belonging to the Sino-Japanese vocabulary.
Words made in Japan
While much Sino-Japanese vocabulary was borrowed from Chinese, a considerable amount was created by the Japanese themselves as they coined new words using Sino-Japanese forms. These are known as ; compare to .
Many Japanese-created refer to uniquely Japanese concepts. Examples include , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and Bushidō ().
Another miscellaneous group of words were coined from Japanese phrases or crossed over from kun'yomi to on'yomi. Examples include henji ( meaning 'reply', from native kaerigoto 'reply'), rippuku ( 'become angry', based on hara ga tatsu, literally 'belly/abdomen stands up'), shukka ( 'fire starts or breaks out', based on hi ga deru), and ninja ( from shinobi-no-mono meaning 'person of stealth'). In Chinese, the same combinations of characters are often meaningless or have a different meaning. Even a humble expression like gohan ( or 'cooked rice') is a pseudo- and not found in Chinese. One interesting example that gives itself away as a Japanese coinage is kaisatsu-guchi ( literally 'check ticket gate'), meaning the ticket barrier at a railway station.
More recently, the best-known example is the prolific numbers of coined during the Meiji era on the model of Classical Chinese to translate modern concepts imported from the West; when coined to translate a foreign term (rather than simply a new Japanese term), they are known as . Often they use corresponding morphemes to the original term, and thus qualify as calques. These terms include words for new technology, like denwa ('telephone'), and words for Western cultural categories which the Sinosphere had no exact analogue of on account of partitioning the semantic fields in question differently, such as kagaku ('science'), shakai ('society'), and tetsugaku ('philosophy'). While many terms were coined afresh (such as and ), many were repurposed classical Chinese compounds, whose meanings were tenuously similar to their western counterparts. Here are a few examples:
Word Classical Chinese meaning Modern meaningteaching of the humanitiescultureworkings of thingsphysicsimperial academiciandoctorcompassionate outlookpessimismtransformationmetamorphosis; abnormality; lewdnessself-determinationfreedom; libertydynastic changerevolutioncrossing a rivertransitiongovernanceeconomycooperative harmony; Gonghe Regencynon-monarchical government; republicanismmonarchrepublican president; republicanism; democracy(all-breaking) spear and (never-broken) shieldcontradictionearth-deity-worshipping communitysocietyweaving; formationbiological tissue
Notably, the names of the military ranks used throughout the Sinosphere were neither coined anew nor repurposed from Classical Chinese, but were based on the ranks under the Ritsuryō government. Certain military agencies, such as the , the and the , were headed by officials titled with , and (see the Japanese article, 四等官), which later corresponded to "general officer", "senior officer" and "junior officer" in the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces and adopted by other militaries in China, Korea and Vietnam. See the articles for these ranks for more (Ranks of the Imperial Japanese Army, Comparative military ranks of Korea, Ranks of the People's Liberation Army Ground Force, Ranks of the People's Liberation Army Navy, Ranks of the People's Liberation Army Air Force, Republic of China Armed Forces rank insignia, Vietnamese military ranks and insignia).
Despite resistance from some contemporary Chinese intellectuals, many wasei kango were "back-borrowed" into Chinese around the turn of the 20th century. Such words from that time are thoroughly assimilated into the Chinese lexicon, but translations of foreign concepts between the two languages now occur independently of each other. These "back-borrowings" gave rise to Mandarin diànhuà (from denwa), kēxué (from kagaku), shèhuì (from shakai) and zhéxué (from tetsugaku). Since the sources for the wasei kango included ancient Chinese texts as well as contemporary English-Chinese dictionaries, some of the compounds—including bunka ('culture', Mandarin wénhuà) and kakumei ('revolution', Mandarin gémìng)—might have been independently coined by Chinese translators, had Japanese writers not coined them first. A similar process of reborrowing occurred in the modern Greek language, which took back words like τηλεγράφημα telegrafíma ('telegram') that were coined in English from Greek roots. Many of these words have also been borrowed into Korean and Vietnamese, forming (a modern Japanese) part of their Sino-Korean and Sino-Vietnamese vocabularies.
Alongside these translated terms, the foreign word may be directly borrowed as gairaigo. The resulting synonyms have varying use, usually with one or the other being more common. For example, yakyū and bēsubōru both translate as 'baseball', where the yakugo is more common. By contrast, and both translate as 'tennis', where the gairaigo is more common. Note that neither of these is a calque – they translate literally as 'field ball' and 'garden ball'. ('Base' is rui, but ruikyū is an uncommon term for 'softball', which itself is normally ).
Finally, quite a few words appear to be Sino-Japanese but are varied in origin, written with — kanji assigned without regard for etymology. In many cases, the characters were chosen only to indicate pronunciation. For example, ('care, concern') is written , using the on'yomi "se" + "wa" ('household/society' + 'talk'); although this word is not Sino-Japanese but a native Japanese word believed to derive from sewashii, meaning 'busy' or 'troublesome'; the written form is simply an attempt to assign plausible-looking characters pronounced "se" and "wa". Other ateji of this type include ('face' + 'fall down' = 'bother, trouble') and ('fields' + 'livelihood' = 'uncouth'). (The first gloss after each character roughly translates the kanji; the second is the meaning of the word in Japanese.)
Types of on'yomi On'yomi were originally used in ondoku ( "sound reading"), the Japanese system for reading aloud texts in the Middle Chinese (MC) language. A huge number of loanwords entered the Japanese language from Middle Chinese, intermediated by these conventionalized pronunciations. There are different types of on'yomi for Sino-Japanese vocabulary, depending mainly on the time period of borrowing.